Auras

BAM! Renders

Anyone know how to make like an aura around something?  Like if I had a person's hand, and they were using magic, is there a way to make an aura around that hand?

Roman_K2

There are DAZ products that are like a thin torus shape or halo, and many kits that do wizardly zaps and fireflies and dragon breath and ghostly emanations and ray gun rays.

Technically speaking, you could make the hand emit light, as in a glow in a dark scene.

One very simple way is to use an image editor that supports layers: set up your scene in DAZ Studio and save the scene and camera settings to disk. Next, make the character that's going to have the magic hand temporarily invisible to the rendering engine by clicking the character in the Scene pane.

Ok, now render the bulk of the scene - there will be no character there in your 1,024 x 768 pixel (or whatever size) scene. Save the render to disk.

Now, bring the character back by clicking him or her in the Scene pane, and delete or blank out everything else in the scene. If you have a special background in your Environment pane (I am referring to the main Environment pane, not the sub-choice in Render Settings) then the process will have to be adjusted slightly but the idea is to do another render with only the character in the screen. Save this as a TIFF file (use the choice .TIF instead of .JPG or .BMP or .PNG) and save to disk.

Now run your image editor and open the first render. Next, load the TIFF render that has just the character.

On the first, main render create a new Layer with something like 50 percent opacity selected. Now go to your render of just the character and circle him or her with the Lasso tool. Copy to the clipboard and go back to the main render and Paste the character in. Current image editors will allow you to paste in EXACTLY the position that your character occupied in your scene in DAZ Studio.

Select the main layer that's now "under" the character layer and, again using the Lasso, draw an irregular circle or oval around the character's proferred hand. Put some feathering on the lasso tool for this; starting out with 25 pixels' worth of feathering should be good. Okay now lighten the encircled area with Brightness and Contrast or Adjust Levels or maybe a bit of both.

Now select the character layer and turn up the opacity to 100 percent. There is now a magical, dull glow behind the character's hand! You'll probably want to loosely encircle the characters hand and wrist and lighten this up as well before you flatten or collapse the two layers prior to saving the final version of the render back to disk under a new filename.

There are lots of variations on this trick incl. various smoke and mirrors that can be done with specific DAZ products and then you re-render the main scene and you paste the tricks in, in new layers. You could also draw little twinkling stars and sparks near the character's hand and wrist; some people like to make a lightened copy of the entire scene, saving it separately as a work file and they'll then use the Clone Brush to put in the stars, taking the location for each "star" from the lighter work file, and drawing in the exact same location on the final version of the render -- doing this will of course create a "new" final render and on and on it goes.

JonnyRay

One trick I have used for hands is to use a glove that was designed for the character and then change the scale and adjust the surface shaders on it to be more of an effect than a true glove. Some shaders that I have used in the past include...

• Strange and Unusual Iray Shaders
• Dark Matter Shaders
• Oso Master Shader 1 for Iray

All of these can create some interesting effects sometimes with a bit of tweaking and adjusting.

Roman_K2

Wow!